"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.

Virtual Reality

Of all the science fictional tropes this may be the one we are slamming into headlong at the most blistering pace. Go to Second Life, play with your friends vie Wii, even share virtual messages in a bottle on your iphone. Take a look at the amazing motion capture on Microsoft's new gaming technology. It's happening.
The effect on societies, and the all-important individuals within them, is far less clear.

I have an avatar.
I am forty-three years old. I am balding and thickening around the middle. I have a mediocre job with a mediocre company which has outward ambitions to be in the top twenty in their sector in five years, but inwardly merely wish to be still in business. My ambitions mirror theirs.

***Editor's Note: Adult Language in the adult story that follows***They've been together long enough for this to become ritual: Deanna Sable in the clawfoot bath, head resting against the curve of the tub, her fingers coiled around a Stuyvesant smoked down to the filter; Kirk seated at the door, bare-chested and nursing his third beer, drawing what comfort he can from the proximity to the cracked tiles. Watching one another, half a smile shared between them, looking for new ways to fill the idle silence.

Aaron ran down familiar streets. He slayed the familiar monsters.
His shoes clinked on cobblestone. Here it was Victorianesque: ornate brick buildings lurching into gray overcast skies, narrow shadow-filled alleys, steam boiling out of grates. For his part, he wore a dated dark suit under a gray high collar overcoat and a top hat--all of it weightless.

The tour boat stopped two blocks updream from their final attraction, the long-term sleepers' zone rendered in immaculate detail: airships, nine-dimensional manifolds, labyrinthine menageries filled with improbable birds and beasts. Everything viewed prior, generated off shift-work, appeared cartoonish along the fuzzy border between mental matrices, and small chatter gave way to genuine oohs and aahs as the boat lurched, then settled at its edge. Cash turned to give the tourists better shots, the whirs and clicks of meme-drives like persistent mosquitos too lucrative to swat.
Headache? came Jezi's voice through the brain feed.

Though there was a bowl of hammer pills in the living room ("Hammer pills! For a quicker than liquor buzz!") Cora elbowed her way through the crowd and went into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine. Getting drunk the old-fashioned way always calmed her down. It gave her that warm fuzzy feeling of being a child again and stealing fingers from her dad's bourbon bottle.
The party seemed to be a success. People were laughing, talking, dancing. Some of the more attractive/confident guests were playing spin the bottle in the corner (What were they, twelve? Not that Cora was any expert on what people did at parties). Her mom would be so proud of her, playing hostess, drinking socially rather than alone on the couch. "Oh Cora," her mother had sighed after catching teenaged Cora sneaking into the liquor cabinet once again. "Drinking alone is just too sad. Drink with friends and no one will say boo."

It took several blows before the monster stayed down. Even then I kept swinging, the axe head moving like a sped-up metronome. I didn't stop until my knees started to buckle. Only then did I put the axe down and survey my work.
The red stain on the floor was a familiar scene, except instead of a young woman a middle-aged man lay smeared on the ground. It was over. No more visions, no more being plunged into the mind of a serial killer at the moment of kill.

"I speak for the President." Drugs make the words difficult to say, but the man asked about my job.
"He's not the press secretary, but our sources say he regularly sees the President. Hmm. Charles Milford. Top security clearance. Maybe a speech writer. He'll do."

"I told the boy's parents there was no hope, but so long as he has brain activity they won't give up. Poor kid. He's only fourteen."
"Doesn't matter. His body is shutting down. Kidneys are already gone. We can prolong it for a few days, but we can't repair so much trauma. Still maybe there's something...."

If you find these tablets, we hope that you will be able to decipher them. Unfortunately there is little chance that language as we know it will survive the sands of time. There is also a slight issue with legibility since these words are being scribed by the light of a micro laser.
In short, our race has run out of time. Generations of squandering precious resources and constant abuse of the environment has created a poisoned planet that cannot recover. Those who have not yet died from the radiation will soon perish from lack of breathable air. Even the elite will not be able to purchase their supply because we no longer have the materials to purify it. To my knowledge, our team possesses the last known reserve and it shall be used to carry out this final mission.

Passing Mr. Lao's office, she noticed he'd left his door open. On the far side, light spilled through the margins of the door that led outside. Maybe it was a sunny day. She tried to remember the feel of sunlight, the sensation of almost looking into the sun, the shape of the clouds, but her mind was full of the pixelated forms.

Erwin stands outside the door of his house/her house and wonders if his wife is home/not home. He has just finished another long day of theoretical discussions about cats and boxes and he just wants to sleep. He knows that whether or not she is there depends on the observation of that morning's event.
In quantum entanglement, if the measurement of one entangled particle is known (clockwise), the other will have an inverse corresponding value (counterclockwise), no matter how far apart they are.

OneFirst and most importantly, believe you're doing the right thing. Tell yourself this guide will work--tell yourself whatever you need to in order to step into your POD, close the door, hook up, and log into the game. After that, act normal. Wear your avatar like the mask it is.

My most treasured memory is not my own. It hangs on my dresser, captured in a stained glass bubble. I bought it for a week's worth of work.
It was not an easy find. There are laws in place to prevent people from slapping a memory piece on an infant, so I had to go through the black market. But it was worth it.

Now if we, like those characters in recent movies, discovered specific clues in the world around us suggesting that we do in fact live in a simulation, we would of course consider those clues carefully to see what they say about how we should live our lives. --Robin Hanson
Listen. We're fairly certain it's true. The laws of the universe just don't make sense the way they should and it's more and more apparent with every atom of gold we run through the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and every electron we smash up at the Large Hadron Collider that we are living in a universe especially constructed for us. And, since we all know infinities cannot be constructed, we must conclude that our universe has been simulated.

I don't understand. All I did was fix her.
All my life--since before I can remember!--you've been telling me to take care of Emmy, and I have! I do! Better than anyone. I always make sure she's got food and I take her everywhere I go and make sure she's ok. She almost NEVER gets hurt when I'm watching her, and ok, there was that one time, but that wasn't my fault! She just stuck her hand in the maker--how was I supposed to know she'd do something like that? Everyone knows you're not supposed to--it says so right on the front!

Terry bit the inside of his cheek again. He felt disconnected from himself, from this single-window room. In fact, it wasn’t like a hotel room at all. More like somewhere between a forgotten closet and a prison cell. Despite the neutral colors, the telephone’s dark cradle gave the room’s nature away. “Listen…” Terry began, slowly.
“No, I know,” said the voice of Margie. “I know all about it. They scan your brain, take your memories of your spouse, and make a program you can talk to--just once, one year later--to say goodbye. For closure.”

Susanna closed her eyes in death and opened them to the glittering, golden streets and pearly gates of Heaven's entrance. There waiting for her were her mother, sister, and grandmother. She knew all along that they would be there. After her initial registration by St. Peter and some paperwork, she rushed into her mother's arms.
"So wonderful to see you," Mom said.

It was an aching white blank, with little fissures where code leaked out like drizzling rain, but nobody seemed to notice except Adelaide.
"Nina, look," she said at recess, on the squeaking playground swings. "The sky's got a glitch." She kicked out hard, trying to soar high enough to touch the faulty firmament.

Cassie's six month contract passed like a fleeting dream, and then she was awake in neural recovery, sipping out of prepackaged cups of water and letting a bot festooned in yellow smiley face stickers check her vision, her balance, her reflexes. The wallscreen across from her showed a blue sky where the puffy white clouds spelled out date and time. She'd gone under in March and now it was August.
Her mother was not there to harangue the human doctors and exhaust the administrative AIs, but Cassie had known not to expect her. Not after Cassie arrived home for holidays with fresh gauze scarving her neck, her skin still puffy around the shiny white neural notch that would let a digitized human consciousness sit at the top of her spinal column and inhabit her, move her, be her.

"Come on, Bea. I said I was sorry. Can't we just roll back?"
Bea is sitting on the couch with one hand clenched between her knees, the other propping up her head. She is staring straight ahead, but her Stream is shielded so Tyus can't tell if she's watching a show or messaging her sister or just staring straight ahead.

To read the Dear John letter, I had to throw something away. To free up some memory in my apartment. As I slapped one of my bedside lamps into Recycle, I wondered if breaking up had been easier when people had physical bodies. Before we all uploaded ourselves. Before the Simulation's inviolable objects-per-owned-volume policy forced you to get rid of a thing you loved each time you wanted something new.
But I didn't want anything new. I only wanted to know why David had left me.

It feels strange to me, deep in my stomach, that I can't find my ten-year-old girl in real life--but that, maybe, I can find her here.
My hand shakes on the computer mouse as I log in to Second World, using one of the default avatars--a woman with straight blonde hair like a plastic shell and the expressionless face of a crash-test dummy. I try messaging my daughter through the in-game chat window right away, but my message bounces back. I check for her name, "fluttercat," on the online user list, but it's not where it should be between "flutter14" and "flutterkid." My throat constricts with a swallowed sob, but I refuse to believe this tenuous connection to my missing daughter won't pan out. Maybe she's set her status to "hidden."

Veterans are most in demand. The rawest memories, brutal and blood-sticky, they're what people want.
The movie studio found Josh through the veteran's register, then did research. No friends, no family, an old alcoholic living on disability. His life lost to the pain of the past. They're the ones with the best stories to tell.

Admit it, the idea has occurred to you before. Maybe this entire world revolves around you. Maybe everything is an intricate illusion. Maybe you're the only actual person on a show about your life that the universe watches. You quickly dismiss the thoughts, never vocalizing them. Only sociopaths and narcissists would think such a thing.
That was Rick's idea. It's not egotistical at all to have those thoughts. They're right. The clues are all there. But Rick suggested that we make such a thought seem self-involved. We created platitudes about humility and instructed our craziest characters to articulate similar theories so that you would be ashamed of forming your own. Rick turned out to be right.

The God-King of the East lay at her feet, one arrow jutting from the gap between his bronze cuirass and his skirt of studded leather, another through the eyehole of his crested helm.
She had fulfilled every part of the prophecy.

Sam knew Elena wanted him to leave his dead wife. He peered up at Elena's eyes. Her squint of disapproval egging him on, he opened the door to the Room.
The bright light scorched his eyes like when he was little and stared at the sun and Mom said it'd blind him. But eventually, after the door closed behind Sam with a metallic click, his sight adjusted.

Sarah sticks the needle in her arm and falls backwards, feeling the pain of the wound and the soft sheets of her bed. It doesn't hit her immediately. Several minutes pass as the nanites travel through her bloodstream and latch onto her brain. To Sarah, those minutes last an eternity. Each time she injects, the wait feels longer than the time before. She craves for the connection to be initiated, to be alive with the world again.
The nanites will attach to the neurons in her brain and enable a wireless data connection. The interpreter software she installed months earlier render the webpages as something that can be interacted with by thought alone.

***Editor's Note: Adult languageShe manifests about three feet away from him, a moment of static and then a perfectly formed human being. She is a blend of his favorite aunt, his primary school teacher, and the barista in his local coffee bar. She is pretty, in a nonsexual kind of way. She is as bland and nonthreatening as the plain white room they are standing in, and he knows instinctively this whole staging point is designed to put him at his ease.

Sure, I'll state my name for the record. It's Maggie Rodgers, with a D. Like "and Hammerstein," not like "Mister." Where should I start? All the way at the beginning?
So, on paper the project was called the Supersimulation, but privately, we called it "The Nine Bajillion Names of God." Hard to get research funding under the auspices of an inside joke.

Nathaniel remembers this. The leather wrapped around the steering wheel stays cool beneath his grip. His fingers are clenched tight and his hands are losing feeling. Now they are as numb as the rest of him. He knows every dip and crack in the hard-packed dirt of the road. He knows which tree branch will strike the roof of the truck. He knows he will kill a man.
Nathaniel doesn't try to swerve when the hunched figure steps out in front of him. He remembers this. He doesn't flinch when the body flies up and over, hitting the windshield and leaving jagged cracks that disfigure his vision. The sound of the body rolling off the hood is like an echo and his feet leave the pedals as the truck rolls to a stop.

Styler leaned towards the clock and pinched something from the air. I felt the room move. Everything move. She held it out to me and I dropped the paper plane I'd spent all afternoon folding and refolding and never getting right.
"A second," she said, pushing my grasping hands away and plucking the handkerchief from the top pocket of my jacket. Pinstriped, my suit a perfect miniaturized copy of my father's. Styler wrapped the second in it, made me put it in the inside pocket, the one that carries things closest to your heart. Usually a man's wallet. Figures.

You are there again. Near the rock. In the blackness; in the void. I know that it is you, even though I cannot see that it is you.
I know it is not me. I am not there. Not there, where you are. You slump against the rock. It is a small, unnaturally round, boulder. It supports your back as you recline against it, uncomfortably. You roll to your left, twisting, and push off the rock, into a standing position. You lift one foot, place it on the rock, for reference as much as for support. Your faded trousers, cut off below the knees, show a gap of hairy calves above sandaled feet--or they would if it were less dark. You still wear your glasses, useless though they are in this continual night. You have no shirt; you are comfortable enough and you are easier for me to monitor without it. You step up, onto the rock. With this exertion I can sense that you are in good shape, your muscles are lean and your joints smooth even though you have begun the second half of your natural lifespan. You step carefully off the rock and amble forward into the dark.

It's the chance of a lifetime. Or at least, that's what they tell her. She only knows that the cameras are rolling and the company has been planning this for months and she is, in actuality, nothing more than a glorified guinea pig. The first woman to experience simulated time travel created from pieces of her own memory.
"Due to the simulator's design, we really have no idea what kind of experience you'll have," her boss explained to her several days earlier, ten minutes before the final press conference. "We loosely control the setting and structure of the environment, but as for dialog, interaction, character realism..." He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed casually behind his head. "That's where you come in." She imagined herself as the last point on his checklist, a tidy box to be filled in, imagined him thinking: See, it's done. Look what I accomplished. She nodded, but the words "character realism" left a bitter edge in her throat. It'll be me in there, she thought. My fourteen-year-old self.

"It's always a beautiful day."
Those words, not spoken but thought, fell across Ward's mind. He even noted, with a chuckle, that the "voice" in his head had the same Massachusetts accent as he did. It spoke his language; anything to make him feel at home.

Camille knew the moment she picked up the package a Mirror Man would hunt her. They infested the shopping districts. Shoulder forward, she pushed down the crowded street. The consumers parted around her. Focused on their personal networks and visual clutter editors, their early warning systems guided them away from collisions.
No one could see her. She was a blocked object. No one saw the dirt on her boots, or the cracks in her third-hand leather jacket, or the ribbons on her dreadlocks. No one saw the personal network contacts in her eyes flashing red every two seconds.

When he realized how upset his wife was, George wondered if he might have miscalculated. Normally a quiet and loving partner, she was unpacking the dishwasher with a great deal of clattering and muttering.
"It's not as though you even ever dated her!" she said, slamming a series of mugs into the cupboard.

The curtains billowed as a cold gust swept through the open window. Unknown voices whispered on the breeze with a metallic tincture, sending chills down Miranda's spine.
"Someone's out there," she said.

Meredith looks up from her second Scotch and meets the gaze of a tall man, straight dark hair, blue eyes. He smiles, and glances away almost immediately. Shy.
He's just her type. Though she doesn't remember ever going out with a guy this good-looking.

It was a beautiful day, bright and almost cloudless. Sunlight slanted through the tall windows that ran along the east side of the gently aging, 60's-era Sciences Building. The effect, Vikram sometimes thought, was like being in an open corridor in a cloister. He was heading back to his office, having just refreshed his cup of tea, when the door of the Department Head's office opened, and the great woman herself stepped out. Vikram knew that this was not a coincidence; it never was.
"I just saw your paper in Physical Review, Vikram. I thought it was very well done. However..."

On days like these, when the boredom reaches down Park's throat like a debutante's finger, it's all he can do not to hop on his board and hoist a hearty double-middle-finger salute to this crummy slice of consensus reality called Home Sweet Home. He'd do it too, if he knew the subroutines wouldn't reel him in, fish-flopping on the macadam.
No way in hell am I going through that again, he thinks, shuddering.

Monday:
Slide a steak knife up your sleeve. Smile when you enter the office through the plate-glass window that faces the sidewalk. The glass will shatter, but it cannot harm you. Because you, my friend, are a Winner.

After Tina's parents got divorced and she and her mom moved to Earth, she spent summers with her dad in the hyper-labyrinth of Ganymede Station 9-B, in a far-off world called reality.
She'd liked it when she was twelve. She'd run all up and down the corridors of the Station, oblivious to the milling engineers and bureaucrats, until the spider-like structure of the All-Seeing Eye jabbed a syringe into her neck and put her gently to sleep. But now that she was older, she was so over it.

Susan wasn't comfortable playing, not after Dan read that you had to name your piece after yourself, and she said so. "It's just a game," they said, and so she played. It was a game where you moved your piece around familiar if generic locations: home, the library, downtown, and places related to school: class, the cafeteria, the athletic field, and behind the bleachers.
Since it was just a game, Susan made choices she'd never make in life. That's why she skipped class with Dan behind the bleachers. When she kissed him in the game, she blushed in real life. She smoked a little, drank a little, tried marijuana. Her grades were fine, but her game-parents grounded her more than once. The consequences didn't matter to her, but her friends grew judgmental.

I move through the aisles slowly, with the casual gait of a bored shopper who's there to kill fifteen minutes while his spouse is trying on shoes across the street. Someone not likely to make an actual purchase and, therefore, ignored by the salespeople. I disregard the flashy displays of electronics piled up high and the enticing discounts. Instead, I study the cameras, the location of the clerks, and the security tag detector equipment by the exit.

While we ate, the news warned of power outages. Hopefully we'll make it through the night. The world may be warmer than thirty years ago, but it still drops to forty degrees overnight, cool enough to need the heat on.
After tea we sit on the couch.

Jackie pulled into the drive of a blue rambler with thirsty brown grass, her next assignment. She always took the company van on her runs, a nondescript white box without rear windows, and--for discretion--side panel branding that vanished as she neared her destination. The company had an app for its field employees with all the relevant details--the subject's name and birthdate and photo, the home and work addresses.
And of course, the cover story.

Disclosure: I was not paid for this review, but I did receive a free copy of "Jesamie: 0-39" by Interpolative LifeLogs LLC in exchange for my honest review of the product.
Jesamie's life was recommended to me by fellow fans of "Twenty Day Cleanse" and "Monk for a Month" because of my interest in ascetic meditation.

***Editor's Note: Adult story with adult language/themes follows***Her figures were tumbling, which was a disaster. Numbers in the top left hand corner of her field of view continued to fall in quick-fire ones and twos--the countdown to obscurity. Taylor didn't get it. She looked good, she knew she did.

***Editor's Warning: Brief adult language, and graphic details of dying and death live here.***I never saw my mother's body after she died. The man on the other end of the line asked me if I wanted to--whether they should delay the cremation so that I could make the two-and-a-half hour drive up the coast to where she lay in storage. Pale and spotted with bright red cherry angiomas, her sides striped with purple scars from multiple kidney surgeries and her arms mottled with worn red gashes where the tremors had caused her to scratch herself, I had seen enough of my mother's body when she had been alive.

The curtains were shimmering behind a moth's silhouette jostling over the doctor's head.
"If you can't, turn yourself in first thing tomorrow," he said. "They'll come get you if you're not accounted for by eight. Personally, I'd do it myself."

Published on Dec 8, 2017

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